I wanted to add a few comments, as I heard from a friend on another forum about the difficulty he had hearing differences when splitting the 408s, and asked me what I thought.
On most humbucker PRSes, the "coil split" settings actually combine more than one pickup, e.g. position 2 on the Custom, is Bridge humbucker with neck singlecoil, in parallel. This is typically the way PRS pickups are usually split in the various positions. The so called splits are actually two-pickup combinations.
When you add another pickup to the equation beyond simply splitting the coils, you're sensing different parts of the string at the same time, you're adding different timbres, and you're going to experience phase cancellations that affect the timbre, as with a studio EQ that uses phase to address different parts of the frequency response.
So you're going to hear these differences much more plainly than by simply splitting the coils on one pickup.
With the 408, you're splitting the coils, and you can select one or both pickups to do that. Select one, and the pickup is very nearly sensing the same narrow piece of the string as the bucker, and there aren't phase cancellations in the same way as with two-pickup combinations. So the differences between single coil and bucker operation are necessarily going to be more subtle.
PRS said the differences are subtle in the video on the PRS site that introduced the Sig Ltd. So this shouldn't be a surprise.
That said, if you're in single coil mode, and switch down to humbucker mode on a 408 pickup, you hear differences in the lower midrange, the high end overtones, clarity and so on. But the basic timbre of the pickup stays with the pickup. It's just a matter of frequency curve emphasis, overtones, and a minor amount of phase cancellation between the two coils sensing different parts of the string and being in adjacent locations.
It's unlike the so-called "splits" typical of PRSes and most bucker guitars, because it's not a combination of pickups you're hearing, where the differences are far more obvious.
Admittedly, I've got 22 plus years in the studio listening for this kind of stuff, so maybe I'm biased, but I find the differences with the coil tapped 408s very useful and true to the sound of bucker or good single coils. In fact, more useful in some instances.
Are they perfect for every single thing you might want to do? Well, what is? I think they're darned useful in any case.
![]-[@n$0Ma☩!©](/data/avatars/m/0/675.jpg?1595235761){kind=avatar}
